The Internet has emerged as a critical communication infrastructure, carrying traffic for a wide range of important scientific, business and consumer applications. Since Internet services are becoming ubiquitous, more and more customers are using their Internet connections for voice and data services. However, a typical broadcast quality video transport service uses either a Hybrid Fiber Coax (HFC) cable or a satellite distribution system. This is mainly due to the fact that video transport requires much more bandwidth. For example, a coaxial cable can deliver 100 channels each at 50 Mbps. The main disadvantages of the traditional architectures for video distribution are the fact that the communication is unidirectional, the bandwidth is dedicated for video services and a set-top box is required at each receiver location.
The unidirectional nature prevents the service provider from being able to deliver interactive services such as video on demand on the traditional infrastructure. Since the bandwidth is not shared with other services, the infrastructure is costly. The consumer also has to rent or buy a set-top box to access the video broadcast services.
Another alternative is to use the IP infrastructure for all voice, data and video services. The main challenge is that broadcast video is a highly demanding application for the receiving device such as the computer. The CPU has to dedicate a large portion of the processing power to handle video broadcast. Furthermore, other receiving devices such as cellular phones may have Internet access but not the processing power for broadcast video applications.
Therefore, there is a need for a method and apparatus that would enable the service provider to transport video services over the same infrastructure used for voice and data transport, and simultaneously allow the consumer to receive the broadcast video without dedicating a significant portion of the CPU resources for the video processing application.